Unified Game Permissions friendship requirement for collaborators is confusing

(Originally a response to this announcement post Introducing Unified Game Permissions)

Recently I was trying to invite someone to a team create, yet the option to elevate them to Editor was greyed out without any indication as to why I was not able to elevate their permission.
Turns out, since I’ve last used Team Create, you need to be friends with a user to collaborate with them.

If friendship continues to be a limitation guarding who can be elevated to contributor, there really needs to be more telegraphing on what options a user has to un-block the action.

Im not sure if the social graph of roblox and the development side of roblox should continue to converge like this. It seems a bit odd to set up your public social presence on the roblox social platform just right to develop on it (especially since we have a limit on how many friends we can have on a single account)
It needlessly complicates the flow to start collaborating with others

Especially after reading this quote, I’m unsure why we would want friendship-status to also be tied to other external entities either.

Mutual groups acting as “organizations” similar to how Github orgs work but by default could make sense as far as making connecting some element of social <-> developer, which is sorta covered already by the Group relationship if the game is owned by a group.


TL:DR; There’s a friendship stipulation for Team Create collaborators that has not always been there. Since it’s been introduced, there is nothing on the Permissions screens indicating that it exists which introduces a frustrating and confusing user experience to both new users and existing users. I also feel that conflating the social elements of Roblox and the developer workflow is a road we should avoid going down.

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It is basic UX to provide tooltips on disabled controls that indicate the reason for them being greyed out, and what the user can do to fix it. Studio severely lacks this kind of polish all over the place to the point where it is prohibitively frustrating for new people to get started developing on Roblox for any kind of serious project. Please invest a significant chunk of time in doing UX audits and walkthroughs on Studio interfaces so small but critical points of confusion can be fixed. While it’s super awesome to see big project after big project coming out, it’s all I’ve seen done for Studio. For the next big project, could we spend some time making Studio feel less like a beta?

Further, it makes no sense to tie users’ social circles into their development circles. I am not typically friends with my employers (nor the other way around), so it makes no sense for me to have to be friends with people who are working with me. Development related features with friendship status restrictions need to be decoupled; let us whitelist specific people / groups / group roles instead.

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Agreed, friendship is not exactly tied to development.

Many users have their friend list near or around 200, the maximum amount you can have.
If they want to collaborate, then, they’d have to unfriend one of their existing friends.

Which is silly. You should be able to invite anyone, or be able to invite people in the same development group. This friendship requirement should be removed.

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New Roblox user challenge: Get into a team create session with another user that doesn’t have a Roblox account.

This involves multiple webpages, 2 different tabs in studio, 2 different studio modals, and includes sending a friend request! And accepting one.

This could just be a single link you share, like google docs. But there’s absolutely no real consideration for UX.

Bet you a new user can’t figure it out. In fact, I had to google search things to figure it out. Seems like a very common problem with Roblox Studio though.

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@GollyGreg, thanks for bringing this up!

I was also having issues with this and it was really frustrating, I don’t know who makes these decisions but this Feature is almost useless

  • Why are we required to be friends with the User we want to add?
  • Why can’t we add Users to Group games?

I also had to do a Google search to figure it out…

We have exactly the same issue with packages!

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